


pins and needles

by TheGoodDoctor



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bickering, Fluff, M/M, Sharing a Bed, brief acknowledgement of the show's frankly tragic premise, canon-typical levels of two men refusing to admit they're friends, imagine how long it takes them to admit they're in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28568649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoodDoctor/pseuds/TheGoodDoctor
Summary: static:adj; lacking in movement, action or changeadj; concerned with bodies at rest or forces in equilibriumLister folds his arms. “Alright. Give us your bunk, then.”Rimmer sputters out of smugness, gazing upon him in abject horror. “Certainly not!”
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 16
Kudos: 65





	pins and needles

**Author's Note:**

> would you believe it - i haven't seen an episode of this show in over a year. this is the product of a month-long hyperfixation brought to you by SOMEONE (sevensilvermagpies!) reblogging a gif set of bloopers, but which failed to involve me rewatching the damn programme. inevitable inaccuracies are, therefore, inevitable, and for this i can only apologise.
> 
> i just find it endearing that they always have bunkbeds, is all.

The water drips, methodical and slow, from the loose rivet. It forms a droplet with tantalising, teasing languor, and then plummets to the bunk, regular and reliable as a traffic jam on the M25.

Lister folds his arms. “Alright. Give us your bunk, then.”

Rimmer sputters out of smugness, gazing upon him in abject horror. “Certainly not!”

“Aw, come on, we can swap your sheets out and everything - I won’t even breathe on your freshly ironed jimjams, swear.” Lister moves forward, hands going out to start pulling sheets and duvets out of the bed cubbies, but Rimmer squawks again and flails his own hands out in front of and partially through Lister’s to block the motion as well as he can.

“No! Where am I supposed to sleep, hmm?”

Lister sighs. It’s late, he’s tired, he just wants to go to bed. His own, preferably - Rimmer’s mattress won’t be all moulded to his shape, and there won’t be that spring that always digs into his spine in a way that reminds him that this whole _last-man-standing_ schtick isn’t just a terrible dream - but his bed’s full of water, so. It would be rather too much to ask for Rimmer to be _understanding,_ though. “Rimmer, I don’t smegging care. You don’t even need to sleep - I hate to be the one to tell you, mate, but you’re _dead._ ”

Rimmer sniffs, nostrils flaring fit to hoover any and all inconvenience out of a fifty-foot cube. “Oh, and so I don’t get to own things, do I? Dead people are exempt from the right to hold property, are we? _We hold these truths to be self-evident, but only if you’re still up and kicking,_ is that it?”

Lister scrubs a hand over his face and, leaving his palm soothingly over his eyes to avoid having to look at Rimmer’s indignant face or to at least give him a handicap should he decide to attempt to take the hologram’s eyeballs out, holds up two fingers. “One, you’re not American. And even if you were, those truths only get you life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and there you’re zero for three. Two, you actually _don’t_ get to own property now. You’re dead. Make a will and shuffle off, man.”

He can hear Rimmer think, and then sniff again. So, no comeback. Nice. Maybe now, he’ll be able to-

“That’s three things,” Rimmer informs him nasally. Lister continues holding up two fingers, but swivels his hand slowly to show Rimmer the other side of them. “And, technically, untrue: according to hologram law, enshrined wisely in the twenty-second century, I _do-_ ” Lister allows one finger to curl back into his palm. “That’s holophobic,” Rimmer says stiffly, after a short pause in which to invent the word.

Lister drops his hand from his eyes, looking without much enthusiasm at Rimmer’s lemon-sucking pinched pout of displeasure. “Look, man, I can’t sleep up there. You don’t need to sleep. This _is_ how it’s going to go.”

“No it isn’t!” Rimmer fairly shrieks, waving his arms through Lister’s again. He can sort of feel it, but only like a weird cold patch or a cool draft. The hologram is entirely powerless to prevent Lister’s movements as he hauls his own duvet down from the top bunk - damp, and thus unusable; Lister hurls it behind him to drape over the table with a gentle thwump - and kicks off his boots ready to get into bed. Rimmer, of course, whinges in quick succession about the smell from the boots, the smell from the socks, and the concept of Lister’s feet generally, but since this is nothing particularly new or original, Lister ignores him to begin clambering into the lower bunk.

Then, Rimmer makes a preemptively triumphant noise which _really_ gets Lister’s hackles up and, before Lister can even blink, launches himself into the bunk instead. He places his palms behind his head slowly and deliberately, sinking into the mattress with a satisfied sigh and beams with sunny smugness up at Lister. It lights up his entire face, making him look cheerful and boyish in a way which he never does, and probably never did as a boy, either. His curls are fluffy where his fingers have run through them, sticking up like a static-filled halo to loosely and gently frame his face, and for once, flat on his back in bed and grinning up at Lister, Rimmer looks relaxed and content.

It’s infuriating.

Lister takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and, through an internal litany of _he’s not even there, you won’t feel a thing,_ follows Rimmer into the bunk and lies down on top of him.

Or, more accurately, _through_ him.

There is a brief silence, broken only by Red Dwarf’s usual moaning and grumbling and the regular drip of water into the bunk above. Lister opens his eyes cautiously and is relieved to discover that he is not looking at the inside of Rimmer’s eyelids - he’s all for seeing things through the other person’s eyes, especially Rimmer seeing things his way, but there are limits. He’s not looking at the shrivelled husk Rimmer calls a brain, either, which he counts as a win; in fact, he can see the ceiling of the bunk entirely unobstructed, as if Rimmer weren’t there at all. Lister’s brain spares a brief moment for concern that he’s crushed Rimmer’s light bee and rendered himself 33% more alone in the universe, but there is a slight sensation of pins and needles developing in his fingers and creeping inwards - and then there is a squawk and Rimmer appears beside him, wriggling out of the shared space at speed.

“How dare you!” Rimmer shrieks, voice at least two octaves higher than usual, and Lister winces and tries to shift his head slightly further from the noise without falling out of the bunk. He doesn’t have much success, and so falls back on Plan B: annoy Rimmer. This is, it must be said, his Plan B most of the time. It’s an extremely reliable failsafe in any and all circumstances.

He stretches and yawns massively, making a grand show of exhaustion which is barely feigned. “Ahh, this is more like it,” Lister says, wiggling slightly as he settles in. Rimmer gazes upon him in abject horror and Lister grins, shooting him a wink. “Cheers, Rimsy old pal. So kind of you to share. You don’t mind me an’ my socks in here, do ya?”

“Yes, I do!” Rimmer says shrilly, but Lister yawns loudly and falsely over the top.

“Ta muchly.” Lister stretches his legs out, wriggling his toes and then, when this fails to satisfy his nocturnal need to shift about, wriggles his entire body into Rimmer’s sheets.

Rimmer’s eyes watch this motion avidly, top to toe; probably cataloguing every point of contact so that he can make Kryten bleach those areas in the morning. Eventually, his gaze returns to Lister’s smug face, his own expression set in resigned fury. “You’re not getting out, are you.”

“Nope,” Lister says, popping the p. “Are you?”

Rimmer sniffs. “Certainly not. It’s my bed.”

They lie in gloomy silence for a moment, Lister flat on his back and Rimmer on his side in the small space between Lister and the wall. Just as Lister is preparing to drift off, Rimmer speaks up. “Why couldn’t you have just mended the leak?” he moans.

“It’s the middle of the night, man,” Lister says, voice heavy and deep with exhaustion. “Go to sleep, f’r smeg’s sake.”

“Can’t,” Rimmer says snippily. “You’re hogging the bed.”

Lister screws his eyes shut, as if - if he only tries hard enough - this conversation will stop happening and he can be already asleep. “Rimmer, you’re a hologram. You don’t need space. Now, shut up and sleep.”

“You think I like sticking my arm through yours?” Rimmer objects. “It’s all - tingly. I don’t like it. Now it may not bother _your_ senseless, thick-skinned self, but-”

“Pins and needles,” Lister interrupts.

“What?”

“Gives me pins and needles.” Lister lifts his foot from where he had pushed it through Rimmer’s shins to see if he would notice. “Me whole foot’s gone dead.”

Rimmer pauses to consider this. “Well, move it, then.” Lister shifts his leg to push his foot out the other side of Rimmer’s calf, their shins now crossed. “ _Out_ of my leg, you goit,” Rimmer snaps, but Lister just turns over and settles down.

“Sleep tight, Rimsy,” he yawns, and allows the comforting familiarity of dripping water and Rimmer sputtering away to lull him gently to sleep.

* * *

Lister wakes with a splitting headache. This, in and of itself, is nothing new: he is aware, thank you Rimmer, that he doesn’t take good care of himself, and hangovers are rather par for the course when one is the last living human being possibly in the whole galaxy and certainly in the mining ship which constitutes one’s entire world. What is different, however, is a weird deadness in his sternum, like a cold iron bar has been thrust horizontally through his chest cavity. He can’t remember any iron bars being stuck in him last night, and he likes to think that that is the sort of thing he _would_ remember - maybe something he drank? Like the time Kryten had made him a Mimas mimosa with moonshine distilled from what he _thought_ was cola and had actually been engine fuel, and Lister’s entire head had gone numb and maybe even fallen off - it had been hard to tell at the time.

He looks down at his sternum, screams loudly enough to wake the dead, and launches himself in one smooth movement out of the bunk and a good six feet across the floor.

The dead in question sits up so abruptly that, were he corporeal, he would have brained himself on the bunk ceiling; as it is, Rimmer’s head disappears into Lister’s mattress as far as his eyebrows. “Battle stations! Red alert!” he shouts automatically, then blinks a few times and removes his head from the ceiling to stare at Lister and recover from his rude awakening. “Lister, what-”

Lister rubs at his chest, now a mass of pins and needles erupting like fireworks behind his breastbone. “There was a - a hand, comin’ out of me chest-” He pauses, and then points accusingly at Rimmer, who looks away quickly. There is just the hint of a blush rising at the tips of his ears. “ _Your_ smegging hand, you goit! Popping out of me chest like a - a limp-dicked flaccid _Alien_ , draped all over me smegging pillow, the worst bloody bedmate since Anne Widdecome with the violent flaming shits!”

“Technically,” Rimmer says, rallying admirably and shifting to sit on the edge of the bunk and point an accusing finger right back, “it’s _my_ pillow, squatter, so I’ve the right to leave my hands wherever I like. What were you doing in my bed anyway? It’s not safe!”

Lister shrugs expansively, still jumpy and cross with misplaced adrenaline. “I don’t smegging know, do I? I was pissed! So were you - maybe you _invited_ me to share your bed.” He leers suggestively to get a rise out of Rimmer.

Rimmer’s face contorts into something furious, and then smooths into a triumphant little smirk. “What, and you accepted? The - what was it, now - _limp-dicked, flaccid Alien_ \- that was good enough for you, was it? That met the exacting standards of David Lister, easiest shag this side of the galaxy?”

Lister flips him off in lieu of a comeback, his brain suddenly reminding him of something else Rimmer had said and that, in the moment, he had been too busy slagging Rimmer off to deal with. “What do you mean, anyway, _it’s not safe?_ You been keeping live cobras under your pillow, or what?”

Rimmer’s smirk falls and he shifts awkwardly in the bunk. “Ah. Well. I thought I’d have another look over the hologram manuals and such, just-”

“-just for the thrill of it?” Lister can’t help but suggest, so’s he can watch Rimmer’s face twitch with irritation. “Ooh, baby,” he says, running a hand over his belly seductively and arching his back into the motion so that the entire left side of Rimmer’s face jumps. “Tell me about softlight safety protocols, oh, yeah-”

“-just to check for ways to kill you,” Rimmer spits out, furious. Lister winks at him. “And I discovered that, in order to keep all your limbs intact, you had better stay out of my space. According to User Manual Note seven point five two, living-” Lister tips his head back and lets out a porn-star worthy moan, curious about how long he can keep this up before Rimmer’s ears start emitting steam. “Listen,” Rimmer snaps, “do you want to know in advance how I’m going to kill you in your sleep, or do you just want to wait and find out for yourself?”

Obediently, Lister crosses his legs and looks attentive. “But if you bring up the manual again,” he says, holding up a finger, “I may not be able to contain meself.”

Rimmer narrows his eyes at him. “The point is,” he says firmly, “you know how when you stick your arm through me for long enough, you get a dead arm?”

Lister nods.

“Now imagine what will happen if my arm goes through your heart for long enough.”

“Oh.”

Rimmer folds his arms and leans back. “I say heart, of course, although under usual circumstances the brain would be equally destructive; you, Listy, could go through life brain-dead for weeks without any of us noticing a thing.”

Lister glowers at him. “Dead heart, though - I see what you mean. Cold, dead hearts are very much your thing, eh? Don’t wanna step on your toes. Sorry, _through_ your toes.”

Rimmer offers him a withering look. “There’s nothing wrong with my heart-” he begins, but Lister is quickly suffused with the need to laugh hysterically.

“Aside from it not beating, you mean. Oh, and you’re the most repressed fucker the galaxy has ever seen - the lid you keep on your emotions makes the lava at Pompeii look like icing sugar.”

“Stay out of my bunk,” Rimmer grinds out through gritted teeth.

Lister raises an eyebrow. “Fine. Thought you wanted me dead, anyway. This way, you could tell Kryten it was just an accident and probably not get chucked out of an airlock.”

Rimmer compresses his lips into a thin, angry line. “What, and have it all over while you sleep?” he says snidely. “If I can’t physically watch the light leave your eyes, where’s the fun? Besides, if we know anything about Kryten, it’s that he probably wouldn’t notice your demise for at least a month after the Cat finished eating your face.”

Lister pulls a face in disgust. “Rimmer, when you do find a cool enough way to murder me, _please_ don’t let the Cat eat my face.”

Rimmer looks smugly delighted at Lister’s desperation. He wouldn’t ask if he could possibly help it, and they both know it. “And why, dear Listy, should I do that?”

“‘Cause you’ll have to watch it happen.”

Rimmer pauses for a moment as he imagines it, and then his face scrunches up in disgust as well. “Deal,” he says. “I’ll figure out a satisfying homicide, and then it’s out the airlock faster than the Cat can say _mm, filet du Lister on a bed of long eyelashes and soft skin, well-marinated in curry spices for over three million years._ ”

“Cheers,” Lister says, scratching his belly idly, “you’re a real mate. But - not that I’m complaining, mind, but - what’s not cool enough about reaching inside someone’s chest and fucking their heart up?” Rimmer makes an inquisitive noise and Lister shuffles on his knees back to the bunks. “Like - prepare for the end, puny mortal,” he intones dramatically, kneeling up so that their heads are level. With his best monstrous villain face firmly affixed, Lister makes a kind of “bleh!” noise and jams his hand into Rimmer’s breastbone. Rimmer tracks the movement with curiosity as Lister wiggles his hand around in Rimmer’s chest cavity, careful not to knock the light bee, and then rips his hand out in a claw as if holding something in his palm. He even makes his fingers pulse in and out in time with the thumping heartbeat noises he’s making with his mouth, and then crushes his hand into a fist on a squishing noise. They both stare at the fist for a long moment. “‘S what I’d do, anyway,” Lister shrugs.

“Lister,” Rimmer says levelly.

“Yeah?” When he turns from his hand to look at Rimmer’s face, he realises all too suddenly how all too close they are. In the course of his Oscar-worthy performance, their faces have drifted to within six inches of one another without their noticing. Rimmer is actually going slightly cross-eyed in his attempt at eye contact. But he hasn’t moved back, and Lister finds himself similarly oddly frozen. He can count every eyelash, every pore, every millimeter of the curl that has lodged itself over the H in Rimmer’s forehead. 

It seems like it might actually be harder _not_ to.

“Did you want your heart back?” Lister offers, waggling his closed fist enticingly. It’s a singularly stupid thing to say, but it beats getting lost in Rimmer’s eyes - he’s not lonely enough for that already, surely. At least one hundred years of isolation before he gets into dead men, and another hundred before he considers _Rimmer._ His standards, low though Rimmer has rightly pointed out they are, demand no less. Rimmer just stares at him, though, so Lister takes the initiative and jams his fist back into Rimmer’s chest and opens his fingers. “There, all better.” This also earns him no response, so he gently pats the area of space within Rimmer where the ‘heart’ might have been returned to. He has no idea if Rimmer can even feel it, but pins and needles are spreading up his wrist.

“Lister,” Rimmer says finally.

“Hmm?”

“Get out of my heart,” he says firmly, and then hears himself. His mouth goes all sucked-lemon in irritation and he huffs, resigned to the inevitable teasing.

But - maybe it’s just that Lister’s headache is clearing up, or maybe he’s coming down with a terrible temporary case of the empathies, or maybe he’s just alone in the universe with people who are never, ever nice to one another - but whatever it is, he doesn’t want to tease Rimmer for it. He just grins and, when Rimmer risks eye contact, winks at him to make him come over all blushing teen and fussing matron: red from the tips of his ears to the line of his collar and incapable of saying anything but _oh, Lister, really._ Lister just laughs and, when Rimmer swats at his face with an incorporeal hand, leans back as if Rimmer really had the power to move him. It’s a kindness he can pretend away, say that he’d forgotten Rimmer couldn’t touch him, but. Rimmer can’t really affect anything at all, and being powerless in the world is - rough. Lister has a hard enough time of floating aimlessly through space, and he at least can poke the steering controls for the illusion of agency. Rimmer has - none of that.

Lister promises himself that he’ll keep out of Rimmer’s space from now on. Not because he likes the smegger, but just as a gesture of - respect, maybe, but even that’s going a bit far. Whatever it is, he’ll do it.

His hand, when he removes it from Rimmer’s chest, tingles, and continues to do so for the rest of the day.

* * *

“‘M sorry.”

Through the crack in his eyelids, Lister watches Rimmer immediately stop reading his magazine, his head snapping to where Lister lies. Then he pauses, pushes a finger through the magazine idly, and then with deliberate cool says, “Hmm?”

Lister swallows with difficulty. “‘M sorry. Stealin’ your bunk again.”

Rimmer huffs and crosses over to crouch near Lister’s head. “You deliberately had that cooling unit on the derelict fall on you, did you? Saw it wobble and launched yourself beneath it just to inconvenience us all? It would be _just_ like you.”

Lister manages half a smile. That was, very nearly, almost nice. Comforting. Then he takes a breath that is slightly too deep, and folds in on a wheeze of red-hot, vicious pain.

“Lister? Lister, are you - should I get Kryten? Where is that mechanised waste of space-” When Lister manages to pry his eyes open again Rimmer’s brows are deeply furrowed with irritation and concern and he flails an arm out towards and through Rimmer to get his attention.

“Leave him be, I’m fine,” he manages. Rimmer turns his frown on him and Lister pats the edge of the bunk invitingly. “Sit.” Rimmer’s gaze turns suspicious and Lister rolls his eyes, relying on those reserves of strength he keeps just to sustain irritation with Rimmer. “Yeah, ‘cause I’m gonna manage to beat you up and jump your holographic bones right now. _Sit._ Your precious virtue is safe.”

Rimmer perches nervously on the very edge of the bunk. “Should hope so,” he murmurs. “Wine and dine me, you cheapskate.”

Lister grins at the ceiling. “Sure. You can _definitely_ afford standards.”

Rimmer sniffs, but settles into the bed. “I’m a catch,” Lister is primly informed. “Any rich, sophisticated person would be lucky to have me.”

Lister reaches up one hand and clicks his fingers. “ _That’s_ why I always considered you my greatest misfortune.”

“Refine your tastes.”

“Never. Common as muck, me.”

“Certainly mucky,” Rimmer says, turning his nose up. There’s a curious slant to his mouth, though, as if he’s not quite _not_ laughing, and Lister allows his own lips to tilt in reply. “That was the cleanest I’ve ever seen you, Listy, when Kryten-” The slant vanishes and Rimmer swallows; Lister feels a frown forming on his blow like a cloud readying for rain. “When Kryten disinfected you for the mediscanner,” Rimmer finishes, although his tone is not nearly so level, nor so light, as it had been before.

“You were there?” Lister asks, and Rimmer nods sharp enough to cut paper. Lister breathes carefully, brow furrowed. He had been somewhat unconscious at the time and still hasn’t seen the extent of the injuries beneath his bandages. “Was it - nasty?”

“Your unclothed body?” Rimmer says, aiming for snide and missing by miles. His face twitches like it’s being pulled in several different directions at once, and then his eyes fixate on his hands in his laps. The knuckles are white and bloodless, and Lister wonders why - why holograms have blood, why someone bothered to add in that pointless little humanoid detail, why Rimmer is holding his own hands that tightly at all. Rimmer sighs shortly. “Yes,” he says. “It was nasty. Your ribs are broken, you realise; you’re bruised all over. Looks like someone’s vomited under your skin.”

Lister screws his face up in disgust. “Oh, cheers.”

“You asked!”

“No-one has ever asked another person to describe them as a skinbag full of chunder, Rimmer, no-one _ever_.” Rimmer shrugs awkwardly and goes back to staring at his own hands. Lister huffs at the ceiling. “Well, this is gonna be boring, isn’t it?”

Rimmer glances at him blankly and Lister gestures at his own prone form.

“Getting better. It’s gonna take forever and I’m just gonna be stuck in your bunk waiting for it to be over. No more scavenging, no more guitar, just lying here.”

Rimmer raises an eyebrow at him. “Sounds lovely,” he says dryly. “Avoiding you has never been so easy. And no-one, no-one _ever_ ,” he parrots, “will miss your godawful racket. Not to mention, the rest of us could do without hauling your limp and mangled form back from whatever scrape you’ve managed this time.”

Lister raises his own brow in retaliation and Rimmer folds his gaze quickly back upon his hands. “You do a lot of hauling, do you, Caspar? Always first to lend a slightly see-through hand?”

“It was still - unpleasant,” Rimmer snaps. “When Kryten carried you in - well.”

“Were you worried, Rimsy? Didn’t want me to leave you alone with Krytes and the Cat?” Lister says, only slightly smug.

Rimmer shoots him a glare. “Would you want to be left alone with them?” Lister tilts his head in concession and Rimmer huffs a sigh, staring out into their shared room. “Really,” he begins thoughtfully, “the worst of it is being kept from my bunk all this time.”

Lister gapes at him. That had almost been a nice-ish moment. “ _That’s_ the worst of it?”

Rimmer hums his agreement. “Really, I should have had Kryten put you in your bunk - it’s just like me to come over all self-sacrificing at the wrong moment.”

“ _I got crushed by a massive smegging fridge, you goit!_ ”

“But Kryten did say you’d need to get out and urinate and I really didn’t need you pissing on my head,” Rimmer opines and Lister’s gaping mouth closes on a look of some determination.

“Give us a bit more encouragement and I’ll see if I can manage it,” Lister threatens darkly.

Rimmer raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to piss three feet into the air?”

Lister offers him a shit-eating grin. “And not get wet. So go on, smeg off,” he says around a yawn, reaching out to make a shooing motion at and through Rimmer. “It’s your bunk you’re risking.”

“You’re disgusting,” Rimmer informs him calmly as Lister’s hand drops to the bunk, his fingers buried in Rimmer’s thigh up to the knuckle. It’s tingly and numbing quickly, as though Rimmer is sitting _on_ his fingers and stopping his circulation, but it’s also - kind of - nice? Like Rimmer’s really there. Like Lister isn’t totally alone in the known universe.

Rimmer’s fingers, still twisted together, twitch slightly in the direction of Lister’s hand and, in that brief moment before he falls asleep again, Lister reckons that - if Rimmer had been corporeal - he might have tried to hold Lister’s hand.

* * *

“Lister? Are you... _crying?_ ”

He swipes angrily at his cheeks and sniffs mulishly. “No,” Lister lies.

“You _are_ ,” Rimmer corrects, looking at him suspiciously from the doorway. He appears to be under the impression that Lister crying could cause him to explode at any minute and that, therefore, some distance ought to be maintained. For Lister’s part, he’d quite like Rimmer to take this idea and run with it - to fuck right off, in fact. Or come here, rub his feet, and tell him he’s pretty. He hasn’t decided. “You’ve not come over all _maternal_ , have you?” Rimmer asks, in such tones as would suggest that Lister has caught some kind of deeply embarrassing and highly contagious disease.

“Shut up,” Lister says wetly, tucking his legs up into Rimmer’s bunk and curling up as much as is presently possible. Between the twin obstructions of his knees and the frankly massive bump, he can’t see very much of the room and nothing at all of Rimmer. Fucking ideal. Who knew pregnancy had such perks?

Until it abruptly _isn’t_ a perk, because Rimmer is folding his lanky frame into the foot end of the bunk and Lister hadn’t even noticed his approach until it was far too late to do anything about it. “Well? Out with it, then,” Rimmer says, and Lister is powerless but to gape in surprise at him.

“ _You_ want to know what’s bothering me?” he says, too incredulous to keep crying, and Rimmer straightens his spine as much as he can in the small space without driving his head through the bunk ceiling. “ _You’re_ initiating a heart-to-heart, and you reckon there’s something wrong with _me?_ ”

“I am checking,” Rimmer says with exaggerated calm and rationality, “that you are not in pain and likely to either perish or give birth in my bunk. Both would be - messy. And I don’t see why I should have to suffer for it, just because the great blue whale you’re imitating can’t manage stairs.”

Lister glares at him. “I’m not doing either. Smeg off.”

Rimmer settles in the bunk and smiles with deliberate bland banality at him. “No. I’ve missed this old bunk, in the months since you evicted me from it; I’ve had good times in here, good memories-”

“-those wonderful dates with your own right hand,” Lister contributes acidly. “Not long affairs, but by God was there a lot of them.”

Rimmer narrows his eyes at him. “Oh, you can criticise, can you? One night of probably underwhelming passion, and you’re up the duff without a paddle. Me, I get an endless supply of satisfaction without a shred of consequences.”

Lister puts on his best expression of heavily feigned sympathy. “Yeah, but she never calls you back, does she?” Rimmer looks like he’s struggling to resist a rude hand gesture - not to spare Lister’s feelings, obviously, but to avoid sinking to his level. “And anyway, what the smeg is _probably underwhelming_ supposed to mean?”

Rimmer goes a little pink around the ears. “It’s a perfectly logical assumption,” he explains, voice oddly strained as if he’d rather hoped Lister wouldn’t pick him up on the comment. Why the smeg he had thought Lister _wouldn’t_ is frankly a fucking mystery. “It’s about the rules of supply and demand, Listy. We’ve established already that you’re a very easy shag-”

“- _we have smegging not-_ ” Lister interjects with no small amount of feeling.

“-so _supply_ of Lister-shag is clearly very high,” Rimmer continues as if there had been no interruption at all. “When supply is very high, demand goes down, because the product has less value.” Rimmer mimes this stock market of Lister’s libido with his fingers, and then spreads his hands and shrugs. “You, Lister, provide cheap and undesirable sex.”

“I smegging don’t,” Lister says, shuffling his bulk awkwardly in an attempt to sit up and put Rimmer right. He reaches for an extra pillow by his foot to prop himself upright and Rimmer absently, obligingly, leans out of the way so he can grab it. “It’s not a - a natural phenomenon, like wind or whatever, that happens whether there’s demand or not, right?” Rimmer snorts and opens his mouth, probably to snipe at Lister about him shagging being an unnatural phenomenon, but Lister talks right over the top. “Supply just meets demand. It’s balanced. More supply than demand is you and your meaningful relationships with blow-up dolls.”

Rimmer sniffs, irritated. Neither of them are really well-up on their economic theories and the longer this argument goes on, the more obvious that fact is going to become. He nods at Lister’s bump. “And that _balance_ is making you feel much better just now, is it? You, Lister, are a cautionary tale about unsafe, irresponsible sex.”

Lister sighs, the fight gusting out of him and leaving him slumped in a pile of pillows, too huge to even curl into a fetal position and despair; pregnant and alone and afraid. “Yeah,” he mutters, “guess I am.”

There is a long silence from the other end of the bunk. Rimmer is, presumably, switching his brain off and on again at this sudden tonal shift, but Lister keeps his gaze glued to the end of one of his dreads as he twists and coils it idly between his fingers. He doesn’t want to look at Rimmer, or deal with Rimmer, or be more than a metre away from him, and frankly, it sucks.

There’s barely six inches of mattress between their socked feet. Lister could stretch out and be knee-deep in Rimmer’s ankles and hips, sending tingles up and down his thigh and numbing his painfully swollen ankles. Rimmer would probably think he was being kicked out.

“I didn’t mean that in a bad way,” Rimmer lies awkwardly, as if there was a not-bad way to mean it, and Lister shoots him a brief glower over his drawn-up knees. Rimmer wraps his arms around his own shins, holding on to the balls of his feet with the opposite hands like a small child in front of the telly, and balances his chin on his knees. “Well. I didn’t mean to - you know.”

Lister does know. For their many and varied sins, he and Rimmer rarely try to be actually hurtful to one another. Bickering is a long-accepted constant; they are frequently rude, unpleasant and downright disrespectful. But Lister does know that Rimmer hadn’t actually meant to be _mean._

“You’re alright,” he says softly, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I’m just - tired. And - I don’t know. Maybe you’re-” he makes a face, “-right.”

He looks up at Rimmer, who couldn’t look more stunned if an entire troupe of morris dancers had appeared before him, jingled out a little dance in his honour declaring him their god and then taken it in turns to conk him on the head with their stupid sticks. “Me?” he says, in a tone of some disbelief. “I - I mean, yes, probably, but-”

“Red Dwarf is a shitty, shitty place to have a baby,” Lister says, steam-rolling over this stuttering conversational dead-end. If he lets Rimmer drag him into acknowledging that he’d said Rimmer was _right_ , he won’t rest until he has it in writing, recorded, and stated before the rest of the crew, and there are some things which Lister simply will not do. “We’re grown adults in bunk-beds. We don’t have cots or clothes or any smegging idea what to expect. _I_ have no idea how to be a good dad. Even if I am, I’m still the last human being that we know of - what kind of environment is that, for kids? _Happy birthday, kiddos; get used to these four faces, ‘cause they’re all you’ll ever see?_ It takes a village, apparently, and all I’ve got is a crumbling rustbucket and the vast empty silence of space. Paragon of parenting, me.”

If you’d asked him earlier, Lister wouldn’t have said he was going to tell Rimmer any of that. Not even if the man had asked nicely, and he certainly hadn’t done that. Not unsurprisingly, Rimmer looks rather overwhelmed when Lister chances a glance in his direction.

He sighs again and tucks his feet in a little more, taking his toes that little bit further from Rimmer. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Shut up.”

Lister gapes. “Excuse me?”

Rimmer waves a hand, like that last moment was simply a disobedient etch-a-sketch. “No, no, I mean - be quiet. You’ll be a fine parent, and besides, you’ll have Kryten and the Cat and me. Well, maybe not the Cat. Perhaps to dress it? But mostly, Kryten and me.”

Lister raises an eyebrow. “Kryten, sure,” he says, “but Rimmer - you can’t touch anything. What are you going to do for the babies?”

Rimmer draws himself up proudly. “Educate them in matters of grave importance,” he says solemnly.

“Proper filing of spanners is not a matter of grave importance.”

Rimmer slumps back down. “Smeg off, it is too. Can’t you just do what your parents did, when you were a baby? You turned out - well, you survived to adulthood.”

“Better’n you did, yeah,” Lister says, managing to muster a grin at the annoyed look Rimmer offers him. “My birth parents left me under a pool table, Rimmer, remember?”

“I didn’t mean them, I meant your adopted parents. They were alright, weren’t they?” Rimmer sounds almost desperately hopeful.

Lister shrugs. “I think so. But - it’s not like I remember every single thing they did, though.”

Rimmer nods. “Alright, Listy. I shall offer you the benefit of my great experience, out of the goodness of my own, kind heart.” Lister rolls his eyes and folds his arms over his bump as Rimmer sits up straight with a hand dramatically placed over his sternum. “Anything my parents did for me, you should avoid like the plague. The twins will be fine.”

That - hurts. Oddly. Like a physical blow. He’d always known Rimmer’s family were awful - anyone involved in production of the neurotic, cowardly mess commonly referred to as Arnold J. Rimmer must be the kind of person that even Lister wouldn’t go for beers with - but the scale of the disaster, and to hear Rimmer himself admit it... Lister shakes his head gently. “Mate,” he says honestly, “I have no idea what your parents did to you, and frankly I’m afraid to ask.”

Rimmer sniffs and tucks his chin back into his knees. He looks abruptly very small, and very sad. “Just as well. I wouldn’t tell you if you did.”

So sue him, he’s horribly hormonal and pregnant and, if not really alone, at least somewhat lonely; it’s an effort not to launch himself to the other end of the bed and weep into Rimmer’s shoulder. He sniffs instead and looks away at the bunk wall. “Pair of specimens, we are,” he says, thumbing at his nose.

“Speak for yourself,” Rimmer mumbles, a token objection. He’s staring at his own feet, flicking idly at a loose thread in his sock which will never get worse and never get better. An eternally undarned sock, forever unravelling into bleak infinity.

“Rimmer,” Lister says very seriously as he watches the hologram fuss with the thread, “if you weren’t such a colossal smeghead, you’d be a fucking tragedy.”

Rimmer pauses in the flicking of his sock as he digests this. “That’s possibly the worst thing anyone has ever said to me, Lister, thank you,” he says calmly. “I hope you’ll believe me when I say that, if you weren’t an incurable, insufferable goit, your loneliness would be the saddest thing I could imagine.”

And then, like a quiet, gentle glow, Rimmer bites his lip and grins at his feet. Lister snorts. “Oh, Arnie, you say the sweetest things,” he says, batting his eyelashes at Rimmer when he looks up under his brows. Rimmer sniggers, head tilting on his kneecaps to present his bright, blinding smile sideways - as if Lister wouldn’t see how genuine it is, turned ninety degrees on its side. Lister feels his own grin form to match it, untilted and direct, and Rimmer has to look away and blush like he always does with actual, real affection - and Lister, suddenly and unavoidably, wants to kiss him.

He blinks the thought away and holds out one hand, curved around an imaginary cup. “Here’s to us, then: the saddest fuckers outside of Slough.”

Rimmer snorts and brings up his own pretend cup. “This is the way humanity ends,” he intones solemnly around the edges of a smile. “Not with a bang, but with two tragic bastards in an old tin can. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” Lister agrees, grinning. They bump their knuckles against and through each other; the usual staticky feeling sparkles through Lister’s fingers; and he _still_ wants to kiss Rimmer. More than ever, actually, the poetry-spouting pretentious git. It might be the hormones. It’s probably the uncertain grin and stupid, soft hair and how Lister does actually feel better now, better than he has for days, just because Rimmer has sat with him and mocked him and commiserated and cared. Maybe Lister’s lonely. Maybe he isn’t, because he’s got Rimmer. Maybe he loves Rimmer.

Maybe he’s fucked.

* * *

“Right. Shove up.”

“Can’t. I’m dying.”

Rimmer shoves up anyway. Lister wedges himself into the small scrap of bunk space that this affords him, keeping his left foot planted on the ground to keep him from rolling straight back out again. “Hope it sticks this time. Stop looking so bloody sorry for yourself.”

Rimmer sniffs. “Don’t see why I should,” he mumbles, hunching in on himself as shivers rip through his already-narrow frame. “No-one else is sorry for me.”

“You picked up a box labelled _hologram virus prototypes_ and then dropped it through your own foot,” Lister reminds him, not overly gently.

“I was surprised,” Rimmer whines. “I didn’t expect to _actually_ pick the damn thing up.”

Lister nods. “Yeah, fair enough. Shame we were too busy catching your swooning light bee to find out what the box was made of, really. Could’ve got you doing some work around here at last.”

“Didn’t swoon,” Rimmer mutters, not entirely inaccurately. Rimmer had actually stared in shocked horror at the broken vials sparkling in and around his feet, looked up at Lister in astonishment as greyscale had leeched up his legs like washed-out dye, and then suddenly winked out of existence. It had been, frankly, something of a miracle that Lister had managed to drop the box of bandages he had been holding, launch himself forward and wrap his fingers around the falling light bee fast enough to prevent serious fall damage to their one and only bee.

“Did too,” Lister corrects cheerfully.

Rimmer looks up at him reproachfully, eyes looking rather too large for his head. The rest of him still looks rather dulled and grey, but his eyes - for whatever reason - have remained bright and shining and in consequence rather draw one’s attention. He looks almost cartoonishly cute, and extremely sorrowful. Like a half-drowned kitten.

The universe, frankly, is taking advantage of his soft spots, and ought to smeg off.

“Lister,” Rimmer mumbles, and Lister desperately wants to reach out and push some of his hair off his sweaty forehead. Would, too, only - only he can’t touch Rimmer, and he really, really wishes he could. He hums instead in invitation. Rimmer blinks twice. “‘M sick,” he says, as if this might be some kind of revelation; as if neither of them had noticed before; as if such an inane statement might achieve any kind of anything.

Lister feels his mouth slide into a sympathetic little half-smile. “Yeah, man, I know,” he says gently. Rimmer sniffs and turns on his side to face Lister, knees drawn up and mouth childishly downturned. When Rimmer was a kid, did he ever get sick like this? Did his mum press a cool palm to his forehead, bring him soup and cheese on toast and let him watch cartoons? Was there someone there for him, to ratify his experience of unpleasantness and pain? - to say _yeah, I know. You’re sick. But you won’t be sick forever. It’s gonna be okay, Rimmer, promise._

Lister reckons he probably doesn’t want to know the answer to those questions, actually.

“Kryten says you’ll be right as, after a good sleep,” he says softly, Rimmer’s big glassy eyes tracking every motion in his face. Lister tries to look calm and comforting, but that makes Rimmer’s brows twitch towards a confused frown so he gives up and aims for normal. “It’s rough now, though. I know.”

Rimmer nods sleepily and his eyes flutter; Lister hopes he might be about to manage sleep for the first time since his fever began. At least his being in the bunk too has stopped Rimmer from tossing and turning quite so much - Kryten had been worried that Rimmer might wear himself out and be unable to fight the infection. He’s just lying still, now, but his light bee is whirring more than Windows 95 trying to run three complex high-quality programs at once - or, indeed, three programs at all. It’s producing a huge quantity of heat, too; for all that Rimmer is shivering, Lister can feel the warmth emitting from his chest against his own arm where it lies curved over his stomach. Were it not quite so worrying, it would be rather nice. Feels like another human is lying beside him, with proper body heat and tactile skin, and not just sorry, untouchable Rimmer.

Just as Lister is beginning to think that staring at Rimmer while he sleeps might be crossing a line of good friendliness, Rimmer’s eyes snap open again and he frowns. Lister sighs. He had rather been looking forward to Rimmer sleeping this off and waking up much improved.

Not that he’s worried about him, obviously.

“You can’t be here,” Rimmer mumbles, trying to shoo him out of the bunk without untucking his arms from where they are pulled up to his chest for warmth.

Lister raises a brow at him. “Really? You’re getting territorial now?”

“What if you get sick?” Rimmer says, now pushing at his shoulder with the tip of his index finger and taking great care not to phase through Lister.

“It’s a hologram virus, man,” Lister reminds him. “What you’ve got, I’m not getting.” Rimmer opens his mouth but Lister holds up a finger. “Kryten checked. This one’s all yours. I’d take it personally, if I was you.”

Rimmer looks unimpressed. “‘M bloody well going to,” he mutters grumpily, and Lister just has to smile. He’s a terribly sorry sight, and absolutely furious about it; it’s stupidly endearing. The smegger. “Wait,” Rimmer says, back to frowning at him. “I could still - you know. _Phase._ Through you. Get out of the bunk.”

“No,” Lister says firmly and Rimmer blinks in surprise. “Kryten says I’m to keep an eye on you, and yell if your bee gets hotter or more buzzy - I can’t tell from any further off.” This is only somewhat true; he _is_ supposed to be keeping an eye on the bee, but he could do that from the table, really. Lister forgives himself the lie with the secure knowledge that Rimmer would hate to know that Lister is feeling sorry for him, and thinks his presence might be a comfort. He would also mock him for it, really rather a lot, and Lister can’t be pissed off about that while he’s being worried about Rimmer and the latter takes priority - tonight, for one night and one night only.

“But - your heart,” Rimmer says, voice faintly pleading, and Lister spares a brief moment of self-awareness to acknowledge how very like them it is, to be both visibly worried about one another and having an argument about it. In spite of that thought, and also because it could be said that making Rimmer _not_ worried counts as winning the argument, Lister shifts onto his elbows.

“We could top and tail,” he suggests and Rimmer pulls a face.

“And have me kick your brains out? And your feet in my face - worse, your _socks_ \- Lister, really. Top and tailing with you is a threat.”

But then he shivers massively again and hunches in on himself even more in a miserable little defensive ball, and Lister sighs. He slumps back onto his back. “You’re stuck with me face then,” he tells Rimmer, not ungently.

“Yes, that should make me feel much better,” Rimmer remarks. He sounds like he’s trying to be snide, but he really just sounds miserable. Rimmer should have figured this trick out years ago; Lister will sit and be Rimmer’s verbal punching bag with barely a wince, just because the smegger sounds so rubbish. “Will really speed up my recuperation, that.”

Lister nods magnanimously. “Famous cure-all, my mug is.”

“Humph,” Rimmer says, a little sleepily.

Lister stares at the ceiling of Rimmer’s bunk thoughtfully. It’s late - so late it’s actually early - and he’s beginning to wish that he had managed to get some sleep himself; between the adrenaline of sprinting back to Kryten and the medibay with Rimmer’s bee cradled in his two cupped hands and the curiously boring worry of watching Rimmer toss and turn and get no less grey for hours, sleep had rather failed to occur to him until now. As if his body had decided that it needed no sleep, for Rimmer simply took priority. He’s not really complaining, though. His body had caught the light bee and preserved the hologram within; he’s so stupidly grateful to it that his leg could probably drop off in the morning and he’d only be slightly peeved. God knows he’s spent enough time hating Rimmer; if the hologram hadn’t already been dead, he’s fairly sure Kryten would have had to spend much more time checking both of their food and drink for poison. He’s so infuriating that, even these days, Lister is occasionally tempted to take a swing at Rimmer’s head with a chair and politely inform Kryten that a big boy did it and ran away. But he also, now, can’t for the life of him imagine being apart from Rimmer. Almost everything of significance that has happened in his life has occurred with Rimmer at his side - or cowering under a table behind him, but, you know, _there._ And yeah, sure, this is largely for want of alternative company, but he can’t discount the evenings of slouching over the couch with Rimmer and panning most of the DVDs in the ship’s collection, or playing vicious hands of what had once been rummy but was now so full of house rules as to be entirely unlike the original game, or just sitting quietly together before the great glass plate of stars in the dark and watching the entire universe rolling on past them. There are things that bind people together, whether they wish to be bound or not; like it or lump it, Lister would move what remains of the galaxy to keep Rimmer in this shitty little crew, and this shitty little crew safe.

Besides, trying to teach Kryten and the Cat Cheat’s Rummyriskwhist had been a bloody shambles.

“Lister?” comes Rimmer’s voice, small and reedy in the darkened room.

“Mmm?”

“Don’t leave me, please.”

Lister tilts his head to the side. Rimmer’s eyes are screwed shut, his jaw tense and teeth probably gritted; his hair, still a little faded, looks a little browner than it had a few hours ago. He considers telling Rimmer this: he might like to know, after all, that he’s looking more likely to last the night now. But he doesn’t want to leave Rimmer lonely in the bunk, shivering and shaking out whatever bug is rattling about in his bee, and he really doesn’t want Rimmer to think that he’s going to leave. Sometimes, like now, he can imagine all too clearly what Rimmer was like as a kid and can imagine nothing of him doing _kid-things_ : he reckons Rimmer looked like this when he was home from school with a miserable ‘flu, but he cannot for the life of him picture anyone staying with him as Lister does now, to read him stories and keep an eye on his temperature and let him know that he isn’t alone in a large and dangerous universe.

And Rimmer _asked._ He may be sick, but even so. Rimmer _hates_ asking for stuff like that.

Lister swallows hard. “Nah, man,” he says hoarsely, watching Rimmer’s jaw lose some of its tension. “I won’t leave you. You’re alright.”

Rimmer nods sharply against the mattress. Within moments, his breathing evens and Lister breathes a sigh of relief as, finally, he goes to sleep.

He’s left one hand stretched out, palm up, in the tiny space between them. Lister reaches out and carefully angles his hand to match Rimmer’s and then, ever so slowly, lowers his own palm into Rimmer’s. Like this, it looks like their fingers are linked and not just sliding strangely through the same space; like this, they could be holding hands. Rimmer’s fingers twitch up, cupping Lister’s palm; they’re warm with the energy of the hard-working bee and, as the ship’s dawn light cycle slowly begins, turning pinker as Lister watches.

* * *

Lister flops onto his back and glares at the ceiling; when this fails to make the light above him flicker out in shame, he elbows himself grumpily onto his side to turn the glare on Rimmer. “Can’t you turn that smegging light out already?”

“No,” Rimmer says primly. “I’m still reading.”

Lister allows his head to fall into the pillow, pinning his arms underneath him into weird shapes like semaphore signals. “Rimmer,” he groans, muffled by the pillow. Maybe, if he lies here long enough, he’ll suffocate into unconsciousness and get some smegging rest at last. That would show Rimmer. Probably. If he would only put the bloody book down and notice. “You’ve read that book, like, seven times already. You could probably recite it blindfolded. You actually did, once.”

Rimmer sniffs and Lister cracks an eye open around the pillow to watch him carefully, with pristine precision, turn the page. Rimmer’s fingers linger slightly around the corner of the page, rubbing gentle circles into the paper around a curry-stained thumbprint Lister had accidentally put there when turning the page for Rimmer once. Well, he won’t do _that_ again; and doesn’t Lister feel...some kind of way about that. “That,” Rimmer informs him, “was _Military Achievements Since Alexander the Great Volume Three._ This is _Military Achievements Since Alexander the Great Volume Four._ It’s entirely different.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry: you’ve only read this one six times. My mistake. _Rimmer._ ” Rimmer’s eyes flick briefly to the top bunk and Lister wastes no time in giving him the stink eye. “Put the smegging light out and go to bed.”

“I don’t _want_ to go to bed. I’m not a child,” Rimmer says, childishly.

“Don’t you want to re-learn what sheets and pillows feel like?” Lister wheedles, trying to make the prospect sound more appealing than it probably is. Maybe, after years of incorporeality, paper just feels nicer than a duvet. Lister wouldn’t know.

“And waste my time with unconsciousness?” Rimmer snaps. The page edge crinkles under his fingers and Lister watches him make an effort to relax his sudden, claw-like grip on the page. Rimmer’s long fingers press over the creases, slowly and carefully ironing them flat once more, and Lister gets the sudden, worrying feeling that this is more than just an argument about bedtime, now.

“It’ll still be there when you wake up,” he tries, but Rimmer just scoffs at him.

“And you know that for certain, do you? Based on all the only times that the universe has been _nice_ to old Rimsy, you reckon that this - pretty much all I’ve wanted since I died - this is going to last, is it?” He shifts in his seat to turn his back on Lister a little more and props his forehead in the fingers of his left hand to block his face from Lister’s gaze.

Lister comes to a conclusion, and the conclusion is this: Rimmer is a great big sodding coward. There is a reason that this is a conclusion, and not a revelation. But the point is that Rimmer would sit here until the last syllable of recorded time if he were allowed to, so afraid that his hard light form wouldn’t last that he wouldn’t ever appreciate a single smegging second of it.

Lister, fortunately, is not a coward. He shoves his duvet to the foot of the bunk and hops out, stalks around behind Rimmer, and pounces. His left hand snakes around and slams Rimmer’s book shut; Rimmer yelps in surprise and pain, pulling his fingers out from between the pages; Lister’s right arm snakes around his waist and, with his fingers affixed tightly around Rimmer’s bony hip, lifts him bodily from the stool and away from the table. Rimmer’s heels drag on the ground for a moment in still silence, too tall to be properly carried - and then the indignity battles through his surprise and he begins his somewhat inevitable flailing.

“Lister! Put me down this instant!” Rimmer squeals, kicking his legs ineffectually. Lister merely hoists him slightly higher against his chest and spares a moment for smugness; sure, he’s out of shape, but he has also been almost the only person willing or able to do any manual labour around the ship for quite some time now, and hauling Rimmer about isn’t even that hard. “I’m serious,” Rimmer says, scrabbling at Lister’s arm, “I’ll - I’ll-”

“What?” Lister says, sticking his smug face right next to Rimmer’s, cheek to solid cheek, and grinning. “You’ll what?”

And then they are both quite viscerally reminded what, exactly, it means for Rimmer’s hologram form to be made of hard light: Rimmer, in the course of his flailing, attempts to move his elbow through Lister’s stomach rather forcefully, knocking all the air out of Lister and Lister himself to the floor. Rimmer, meanwhile, is unceremoniously dropped.

“Git,” Lister wheezes, curling around the point of pain on his side and rubbing at it.

“Ow!” Rimmer exclaims in surprise with a hand on his tailbone, and Lister spares a moment to glower at him. “You dropped me! That - that hurt!”

Lister shuffles to his feet and, with a look of such fierce determination that Rimmer recoils slightly, fists one hand in Rimmer’s tunic and the other in his belt. Rimmer makes a tiny squeaking noise as Lister lifts and posts him into his bunk. Or, mostly, anyway; the man’s all leg, so the body makes it in one piece but Lister does have to pick up and shove in Rimmer’s left leg as an afterthought. “Convinced you’re real yet?” he growls at Rimmer, who merely blinks in astonishment back at him. Rimmer’s head is at the feet end of the bunk, which he doesn’t seem to have noticed yet; he appears, in fact, quite content to stare in surprise at Lister and do nothing else at all. “Lights,” Lister says crossly, in lieu of processing that thought.

The room goes obediently dark and Rimmer, the contrary bastard, says “Wait - no - lights.”

“Don’t you smegging dare,” Lister snaps at the computer quickly; the grey box near the door makes an unhappy whining noise, and the lights remain off.

“That’s mutiny,” Rimmer grumbles. 

Lister is halfway up the ladder to his own bunk when he hears Rimmer start shuffling about below him and has a sudden prophetic vision of the future. “Watch your-”

There is a loud clunk noise and a string of remarkably violent swearing from the bunk below.

“-head,” Lister finishes lamely.

“Why is this bunk so small, and why do I have to sleep in it?” Rimmer says furiously, head now at the right end of the bunk and probably smarting rather a lot.

“You picked the bottom bunk,” Lister reminds him, settling back under his duvet.

“That was _millennia_ ago. I was clearly a moron then.”

Lister grins into the dark. “Nice to see that some things never change, eh?”

He hears Rimmer sniff indignantly but, to his relief, he makes no reply. It’s been a weird and exhausting time and now, free from Legion but not its consequences, Lister would dearly like to rest. He’s got an appendix to mourn, after all. Sure, he hadn’t been aware of the little smegger until it had been promptly removed on the grounds of its policy of mutually-assured destruction, but it had been a part of him in its way. For all that life in space is incredibly dull, Lister has become oddly resistant to change: change usually puts them in danger, like losing the Dwarf, and very rarely benefits them. Admittedly, his appendix _was_ trying to kill him, and it is _nice_ for Rimmer to be able to interact with stuff like a real boy, but - can they trust Legion? What if - like Rimmer said - it doesn’t last? His appendix could respawn any minute. Losing his hard light would crush Rimmer.

What if it _does_ last, too? What if everything has changed, permanently, and even though it’s really for the best Lister loses something he never knew he had and his life gets even more depressing than before? Maybe he needed that appendix for something, all sort-of exploding as it was. Maybe it was balancing his internal humours. Maybe, now that it’s free of the confines of his body, his appendix will discover that it doesn’t need Lister any more, that Lister was just holding it back, and that it’s better off without him around putting curried fingerprints on his precious books now that it can hold them itself and _oh smeg,_ he’s definitely just thinking about Rimmer now.

Lister rolls onto his stomach, punching his pillow into submission, but sleep is far out of reach now. He considers asking if Rimmer is awake, but after spending so much time and effort attempting to get the man to go to bed waking him now might be a hypocrisy too far. Maybe he could sneak out of bed and find something on the ship to mend - like that tapping noise. Which has only just started.

And is definitely coming from below him.

Lister frowns. “Rimmer, are you making that noise?”

The tapping abruptly stops. “...no.”

Lister puts a hand over his eyes and sighs loudly. “What the smeg is wrong with you, man?”

“I can’t help it!” Rimmer says, and Lister hears him sit up and sling his legs over the side of the bunk. In the gloom of what light still emits from the emergency lighting around the floor and door, having been savagely harvested for parts and ruthlessly taped over to improve the darkness at night, Lister can just about see Rimmer plant his elbows on his knees and scrub his hands over his face. His fingers settle in his curly hair, pulled wild by agitated hands, and draw tight into fists; Lister wants, very badly, to wrap his own hands around those fists and gently loosen them before Rimmer, in his panic, rips his own hair out. “I keep thinking - it’s gone again. I can’t touch anything. When I was holding the book, I could tell, but now - I can’t. I don’t _know._ What if it goes again and I don’t even notice?”

“Could you do anything about it, if you did notice?” Lister says gently.

Rimmer’s head sags even further. “I could know that I’d wasted it,” he mumbles.

Lister takes all of his common sense, his every fear, and at least half of his self-preservation instincts, and boots them out of the mental equivalent of an airlock. God help him, Rimmer is sad. God help them both. “Come on, man,” he says, shuffling backwards to press his back to the wall and open up a space. “Up you get.”

There is a pause, and then Rimmer’s head turns toward him in confusion. “What?”

Valid question. But he has stopped ripping at handfuls of his own scalp, so. A win for Lister and hair follicles everywhere. “Up. I’m comfy, I’m not going down. Besides, I’ve borrowed your bed loads; it’s your turn to get up here.”

“But your bed, Lister, is full of crumbs and curries and entire colonies of bacteria - entire civilisations, with economies and languages and interpretive dance, all spawned from your disgusting feet. It gives a whole new meaning to the idea of _the great unwashed._ We ought really to record them and their histories for posterity - tell the tales of the fatherland, Big-Toe-onia.”

“Rimmer, you hearing new languages in the night does not make you Captain smegging Kirk. That’s just bog-standard madness. Besides, Kryten washed everything the other day. Get _in._ ”

“What’s the point, anyway?” Rimmer whines. He is, however, halfway up the ladder already; Lister opens out the duvet to let Rimmer in.

“This,” he says as Rimmer lies down, rigid as a board and flat on his back. He has never resembled the corpse he is more than this, although Lister tries not to think about that. Lister drops the arm holding the duvet open over Rimmer’s chest and presses the entire length of himself to Rimmer’s side, cuddling close and dropping his head into the space below Rimmer’s clavicle. Rimmer remains frozen in shock and discomfort and it occurs rather suddenly to Lister that this might have been a really awful idea. “You go soft light, I fall into your chest cavity and we both know about it straight away, right? Until then, you can enjoy the feeling-”

“-of my arm going dead?” Rimmer inquires politely. It’s hard to tell exactly what he thinks of all... _this,_ so Lister barrels on.

“Yeah - hold on.” He lifts himself on one elbow and Rimmer wrangles his arm out from between Lister and his side. When Lister flops back down, the arm floats for a moment aimlessly and then settles like light snow in the space behind Lister’s spine. He can feel it, just about, as it brushes the back of his shirt. Reckons that might be a good sign. “Anyway. You get sensation, so no wasting your new light, and I get to go to sleep. Everyone’s a winner, eh?”

Rimmer hums and Lister can hear his bee ticking as he thinks. “What if I do go - soft, halfway through,” he says, and Lister has to snort at the phrasing, he _has_ to, Rimmer may never give him such a gift ever again - and Rimmer smacks him upside the head. Lister flinches and winces more for the surprise of the thing than the pain; he hasn’t experienced direct consequences like that for years. Rimmer isn’t quite so unnaturally stiff any more, though; he seems to have relaxed into Lister’s gesture somewhat. “Shut it, Lister, I’m serious.”

Lister considers it a moment, breathing deeply and in the process slumping yet further into Rimmer’s chest. He hasn’t been this comfortable for ages; he’s missed having company overnight, and not just for the pleasure of giving his own hand a break. He likes sleeping with people: cuddling up to a warm, breathing weight has always helped him to drift off. He hates feeling alone. Instinctively, his arm tightens around Rimmer’s chest as he yawns. “Well, me head’ll go smacking suddenly into the mattress,” he points out. “Reckon that’d wake me up. Also, me appendix will reappear and promptly murder me before your soft light gets the chance. But - Rimmer.” He turns his head, propping his chin on Rimmer’s chest to look at him. This way, he gets to see right up the man’s cavernous nostrils, but he also gets to look Rimmer right in his worried eyes. “I really don’t think your hard light’s going anywhere. Legion didn’t take it back when we were with him. Why would it go now?”

Rimmer’s head flops back into the pillow and he sighs. “Because,” he says with devastating, calm certainty, “not once have I ever got what I want.”

Lister can’t help it - he squeezes Rimmer’s chest in a gesture which he desperately hopes is comforting. “What if you do, though? Get what you want.”

“I never have before. Promotions, relationships, respect: when has the universe ever been kind to me?”

“Technically,” Lister points out, “you’re the highest-ranking officer on the ship, as you never cease to remind us when you want to weasel out of something.” Rimmer huffs, but does not dispute it. “An’ - I respect you. You can be a real smegger,” he says over Rimmer’s noise of objection, “but you can also be a decent-ish chap and you’re not half as stupid as you seem and - well, I respect you. Way more’n I did when we met, anyway.”

Rimmer is silent for a moment. “That’s still no to the relationship,” he points out, in a small and uncertain voice.

Lister punches him gently in the ribs. “What’s this, smeghead? You cuddle up with just anyone, do you?”

“I meant _romantic_ relationships, Listy.”

“You never had that many friends before you became a mass murderer, Arnie, so take what you can get,” Lister says, feeling himself smile against Rimmer’s chest despite himself. Maybe they weren’t changing too much after all - maybe, even with hard light, they could be just as they always were. “‘Sides,” he hears himself say around another yawn, “you never asked me.”

Or perhaps not.

Lister’s eyes go abruptly wide in horror, and then slam shut in an attempt at self-preservation. Rimmer’s breathing stutters and, under his ear, the bee starts ticking about five times as quickly. “What?” Rimmer says, voice rather choked. “I mean - was I supposed to?”

“I don’t know!” Lister says too quickly, abruptly wishing that Rimmer was soft light again so that he could properly bury his head in Rimmer’s chest and wait for the static to end this conversation for him.

“Did you... _want_ me to?” Rimmer says nervously, like a man edging out onto a frozen lake of uncertain structural integrity.

“Do you _want_ me to want you to?” Lister counters.

“Do you want-” Rimmer shakes his head and gives up on this rather bewildering line of argument. “Look, Lister. Are you actually saying that we could have had a romantic relationship, if I had asked?”

“I’m saying, I never thought about it, ‘cause you never asked,” Lister retorts, face now almost entirely buried in Rimmer’s chest. Ideally, for the purposes of preserving both self and dignity, he would be some distance removed from Rimmer, but he can’t seem to make himself want to leave Rimmer’s side. Possibly ever. Which is - unfortunate. The situation, all in all, is spiralling rapidly out of his control; Lister has resorted entirely to clinging to Rimmer and waiting for it all to make sense again.

“I know I never asked, you goit: I was there, not doing it,” Rimmer snaps - Lister finds this oddly comforting. “But now that you _have_ thought about it - ?”

“Would depend when you had asked me,” Lister says, in a very small voice. “Way back - no way. Even - before the twins were born. Probably not. But.”

“But that was ages ago,” Rimmer says with unexpected softness. “And - after? If I asked you - now?”

Lister sighs heavily and gives up. Rimmer, when Lister pulls his face out of Rimmer’s armpit, is biting his lip and looking at him with a guarded expression - but Lister can see, even in this barely-lit darkness, the hope that carefully limns the edges of it like the corona of a dawn. He hauls himself up onto his elbows and wriggles up the bed slightly to awkwardly fit his hand to the nape of Rimmer’s neck and gently nudge his head towards him. Rimmer goes easily, but he doesn’t appear to be actually breathing, at all; Lister takes a fortifying breath deep enough for the both of them, and fits his lips to Rimmer’s.

It’s not fireworks. If anything, it’s that tingling under skin of pins and needles, but mostly it is, in fact, reassuringly normal; Rimmer tastes like toothpaste, not the inside of a plug socket, and his lips, though soft and pliant, take long enough to try any movement of their own that Lister thinks he’s blown it. But then Rimmer kisses back, gentle and rather hesitant, and Lister just - calms down. Enjoys it. It’s not mind-blowing, kissing Rimmer - they’re both too out-of-practise for that - but it’s nice. It feels almost familiar, like déjà vu; like he could have been kissing Rimmer for five minutes or five years and would feel just as blissed-out and comfortable.

Still. Doesn’t mean he _just_ wants to be kissing Rimmer, mind.

Lister slides his hand down Rimmer’s ribs, letting his thumb settle under Rimmer’s nipple and draw slow, steady lines back and forth there. Rimmer lets out a shuddering sigh and Lister turns his attention to the hard line of Rimmer’s jaw, laving his tongue along it and pressing open-mouthed kisses to Rimmer’s neck. Rimmer’s hand opens and closes in the back of Lister’s shirt, gulping down little high-pitched noises, and Lister takes the opportunity of his distraction to slide his thigh between Rimmer’s legs.

“Lister - Lister - stop, wait,” Rimmer breathes out and Lister freezes exactly where he is, tongue pressed against Rimmer’s neck. Rimmer drops his head to the pillow, presses the heel of his spare hand to his eyes and takes a deep breath. “‘M really sorry,” he says in a shaky voice and Lister frowns, worried. “It’s just - things feel very _\- intense_ right now. It’s a bit - too much. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t last,” Lister says comfortingly, and really means it - if he gets his way, and he fully intends to, there will be _plenty_ of other opportunities.

Rimmer takes a deep breath. “I was thinking more _have a panic attack and cry,_ actually,” he says, voice very dry. “Sorry.”

Lister nods. “Ah. Alright.”

Rimmer’s head flicks up so he can frown at him. “ _Alright?_ You haven’t had a shag in forever and your response is _alright?_ ”

Lister spreads his hands. “Hey, man, I only asked you up here for a cuddle. The sex was _barely_ my idea.” Rimmer is still frowning, so Lister puts a hand out to cradle the side of his head; Rimmer leans into it seemingly without noticing at all. “I can wait. We don’t have to do everything today. Your hard light isn’t going anywhere.” Rimmer’s expression softens out of his concern, gentling into something that looks almost disconcertingly like affection. Lister grins the same stupid, soppy smile back, and then smacks Rimmer gently in the head. “And stop apologising for stupid shit, you goit.”

Rimmer gapes for a moment and then glowers at him. “You’re a goit,” he retorts; Lister grins and snuggles back into Rimmer’s chest. He leaves his leg entangled with Rimmer’s, though, as a kind of bookmark. He sighs happily, pressed into Rimmer top to toe, and Rimmer’s arms gently encircle him in turn.

Just as he is considering falling asleep, the most relaxed and happy he’s been in a good long while, he feels Rimmer take a breath under his head. “What if my hard light _does_ go,” he says, because Rimmer just can’t let things alone sometimes.

“Happens to the best of us,” Lister’s mouth says before his brain can get involved, and he laughs at his own joke. Rimmer snorts and then huffs like he’s trying to be cross. “Seriously, d’you reckon there’s hologram viagra?”

“I reckon you’re disgusting,” Rimmer informs him, in what may be the most cheerful tones Lister has ever heard from the man.

He props his chin up on Rimmer’s chest again to wink at him. “I reckon you love it.”

Rimmer looks at him for a second too long, a funny little smile wedged into his cheeks. Then he leans very gently and carefully forward and presses a kiss to Lister’s forehead. Lister’s eyes flutter closed and he hums, a little happy noise which he had had no particular intention of making. “Alright,” Rimmer mumbles against his skin, and then smiles; Lister can feel it on his skin; in his heart; in his left forearm, wedged beneath Rimmer’s warm, solid body and going dead in a shower of star-like, tingling static.

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: now with art from beloved sevensilvermagpies, in [dark](https://silvermagpies.tumblr.com/post/639523649649573888/pins-and-needles-by-doctors-star) and [light](https://silvermagpies.tumblr.com/post/639555812235395072/pins-and-needles-by-doctors-star-light-verion-of) and [glowy](https://silvermagpies.tumblr.com/post/639569885630971904/i-couldnt-resist-doing-another). dear friend, i adore you.


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